This is a photograph of a video. I took video of a collage executed in 1998 by Maya Poran. Though untitled, I call the collage “Maya’s Vase” because it was executed over the entire surface of a terra cotta pot. I was so taken with the design that I video-taped it (this is the late nineties) and then, watching the tape in a darkened room and fiddling with the various “dials” on the “television” I photographed the images on screen. Or rather I photographed the phantoms I saw in the collage. I then chose some of the photographs to use as reference material for a series of paintings. I exhibited the paintings in a show at Noah’s Underground Gallery in Ann Arbor in early 2000. The show was called, “Images From Maya’s Vase.”
The above from-video photograph was used as reference for a painting called “The Ark’s Abandoned.” The colorful drapery-seeming thing at the top center of the image I took to be the Biblical ark. To the front of it on the right, in the rising flood waters a man shelters himself with a tarp. Between the man and the ark, drowned or low-flying birds.
Though in the Bible’s account the ark is painted with bitumen-pitch-asphalt (?) I treated the designs on the ark’s drapery like calligraphy and quoted chapter and verse the saddest line in the whole Noah story (Gen. 6:6) I wrote it without vowels, as was the fashion:
One of the things I liked most about Maya’s Vase was that it collaged different kinds of figuration, as seen above: a photo-centric (what the camera could record) depiction of water is overlaid with a conventional line drawing of waves. In other places conventional crescent moons hung over naturalistic twilight gatherings, the geometrical stars and stripes of an American Flag transformed into the gossamerest gossamer of angel’s wings. The angel herself seen in the conventional way, as a nude human being with wings, had the most naked, human of flesh, livid and goose-pimpled.
This is a straight-forward photograph of the portion of the collage seen altered by video above. Just a detail of it, not the whole, and turned on it’s side so that you can see that the image of the man covering himself with the tarp arose, ironically enough, from the drawing of a fish.
A pen and ink study of the man who used to be a fish. And a second study, painted in soupy acrylics:
Here the fish is oriented as it was in the original and in the video so that you can better compare it to the man.
To show a little more how generative this process of video-taping and photographing Maya’s collaged elements was, here is another example. It is the same section of the collage as above, this time photographed as reference for a different painting, this one entitled: “None of the Sentinels Know.” (Actually I just changed the title here. This version is close enough and has a more natural ring than the original title.) Here again are the fish and the birds and the drapery. But now I see two sentinels standing watch in front of a typical death’s head.
This is ten years ago and more. My art practices have changed. Up until 2000 many of my paintings took shape in a way similar to the “images from Maya’s Vase.” At the time, I searched for compositions by a kind of divination. I was always photographing videos or video-taping photographs, zooming in, raising the contrast. There was a Rorshach-y Ink-blotty quality to my discoveries. My mind made sense where there was none. It was very much like bumping into a dream image. I found the process bracing and cleansing. Today, the vase is still on display in our “play room.” I value it most of the objects from that time. The photographs I value next. Now though, I value them for their surface qualities, the strange harmonies of the colors, still this mix of the conventional and the naturalistic, the atmospheric effects. These surface qualities demand no explanation, and communicate a charge of meaning as powerful to any viewer as my original interpretations were to me alone.
Now, is the above spam?
Looking through artists’ websites, I sometimes see a thumbnail that looks really interesting, but when I click on it to get the full-sized image, I find that the real image is nothing like what I thought I was seeing in the thumbnail. Sometimes I have gone back and tried to do a sketch from what I thought I saw in the thumbnail. Your discussion of the fish that became a man in a tarp reminded me of that. Sometimes an accident of vision is more interesting than the reality.
Yes I’ve always included either accident or collaboration in my work — you get to new places faster. It’s only in recent years that I’ve realized that what I simply straight-forwardly produce is a new place to a person seeing it for the first time. It was the most obvious thing but it hit me like a thunderbolt.
But generally I like to think that the accident or other kind of unexpected input points us to a reality we wouldn’t have conceived of without it. I don’t mean that in any mystical way. I mean in just the same way a new sound of music will direct our attention to or express a mood we’ve never heard expressed before. Novelty and re-cognition are wrapped up together. Our ability to invent ways to express our experience, to share our experience, always lags behind experience itself. When someone finds a way to say something new about something true, its like a gift we already possess.
Oh, yeah though I totally get the thumbnail experience. Very often I screen capture a thumbnail at the resolution I like it and then blow it up in photoshop. It’s true of my own work. I like to work really small: I tend to make less marks and their interrelations are clearer. Then when I blow it up — used to be on xerox machines or cameras, now it’s scanners mostly — I work to catch the rhythms evident in the little one. Yeah, without projectors, cameras, etc., most of my work would be postage stamp sized.
I like your meta-spam that claims it will help you with spam. Wow. Anyhow, what I especially like is that the image on Maya’s vase isn’t really clear, but here in the picture, it’s almost like you’re giving the viewer a similar experience to yours–I’m trying to look at it and see what I see (despite recognizing the pot!)
Kat’s in the house!